Traditional light boxes comprise one or more compartments, uniformly and statically lit. U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,042,243, 6,823,618, 7,766,536, and 5,573,328 proposed several typical designs of the kind.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,511,953 proposed a light box with parallel secondary walls dividing the compartments and with a pivotally engaged cover. When graphic is displayed, such as in U.S. Pat. No. 7,278,770, a single uniform light source illuminates the entire panel.
When various portions of the display need to be illuminated in sequence, neon lights are widely used. Compared to LEDs, the graphical representations using neon lights are less complex. In addition, the neon lights consume more electricity and are hard to repair.
LEDs themselves are used as displays directly in some designs (U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,929,936 and 7,086,769).
The present design unitizes LEDs and a controller to allow a color graphic image to be illuminated region by region in any sequence and at various light intensities and patterns (by turning on and off the LEDs in the compartment at a certain pattern) to attract viewers' attention to various parts of the image, as well as the light box as a whole.